


Retreat

by Lomonaaeren



Series: From Samhain to the Solstice 2020 [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dissociation, Drama, Extremely Dubious Consent, Forced Marriage, Heavy Angst, M/M, Minor Character Death, Not Canon Compliant - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Torture, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-05
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:41:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27395149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: Harry didn’t understand why Voldemort had suggested their marriage as a solution to the war. He didn’t understand why his friends weresupportingthe suggestion. But he goes into it, trying to be as numb as possible, trying to retreat into his mind and just let the world play out around him—no matter how difficult that is.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Voldemort
Series: From Samhain to the Solstice 2020 [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1993852
Comments: 207
Kudos: 1896





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics that are being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. It should have four parts, to be posted over the next four days. This is very dark; please pay heed to the warnings.

“Tell me _why_ , Hermione. That’s all I’m asking.”

“Oh, Harry.”

And she hugged him as they stood together in the little anteroom off the Ministry Atrium, where he would be going to—to marry _Voldemort_ in a few minutes.

But she didn’t tell him why she had pushed him to agree to the marriage, along with Ron and the other Weasleys and Professor Lupin and everyone except Snape, who seemed to think that they were all mad together.

“Just trust that there’s a reason,” Hermione breathed into his ear. “Please, I promise. There’s a plan. I’ll be able to tell you someday.”

Then she released him with a little push. Harry looked down at his gleaming white robes. He had laughed at the idea when Voldemort suggested it, because, well, why would he want to mimic Muggle wedding customs? Although it was true enough that Harry was a virgin.

But Ron had told him that white robes worn to a wedding were traditional in political marriages used to seal a peace treaty or signal the end of a blood feud, because it signified that both parties were coming to the wedding with pure intentions.

Ron had known that because apparently one of his ancestors had married into the Malfoy family in an effort to stem the feud, although it’d broken out again later for some reason. He’d stuttered out the story while fiercely blushing and avoiding Harry’s eyes.

They all did a lot of avoiding of Harry’s eyes, lately. He wanted to scream at them that he hadn’t turned into a Legilimens when they weren’t looking, but he already knew that it wouldn’t do any good. So he’d kept silent, and sleepwalked through the days, letting other people handle the “peace treaty.” The only thing he knew for certain was that it included provisions that the Death Eaters couldn’t conduct raids and Muggles and Muggleborns couldn’t be harmed unless they attacked a pureblood wizard. He supposed that was good.

He also supposed that Voldemort would torture him to death minutes after they got “married,” but his friends seemed to think that wouldn’t happen, or they wouldn’t have pushed him into this. They did believe he would survive. Harry clung to that. Hermione had promised to tell him the reason for this “someday.”

He had to take what he could get.

 _That was always true,_ Harry thought numbly as he walked out to face the monster.

*

The incongruous sight of Voldemort in white robes would probably stay with Harry until the end of his life, he thought as he came out to find Voldemort standing next to the golden fountain in the center of the Atrium.

Someone had rebuilt it so that there were two figures seated in thrones, lounging there above a tangle of centaurs and goblins and probably other magical creatures. Harry saw that one of the statues had Voldemort’s features before he jerked his eyes away. He didn’t want to see if the other person had his face.

“ _Harry Potter._ ”

More than one person out of the crowd gathered there gasped or screamed as Voldemort spoke in Parseltongue. Harry just stared back at him. It was such a short time after Dumbledore’s funeral. It was moments before their marriage. Did Voldemort think he was going to scare Harry by speaking to him like a snake?

“ _It would please me if you spoke Parseltongue during this ceremony._ ”

Harry met the monster’s eyes and just held them for a long moment. They shone glittering red, because of course they did, but Voldemort didn’t look as if he wanted to kill Harry right that moment. Then again, doing it in public wouldn’t be the point. Voldemort would want to savor it.

And for some reason, his friends thought it was a good idea.

A warning sting came from his scar, and Harry dipped his head a little and said, “ _All right._ ”

For some reason, Voldemort’s face blazed with triumph, and a few more people cried out in fear, but no one rushed for the Floos or the lifts. Harry didn’t understand these people. They probably didn’t want to be here, but no one was trying to leave? Were they here because Voldemort had threatened them somehow?

Or because the wizarding world’s appetite for gossip was just too deep to let this go?

Honestly, at the moment, Harry felt as if he didn’t give a shit. He moved forwards and extended his hands when Voldemort directed him to do so with another hiss, ignoring the way his flesh crept and chilled. So he was going to feel Voldemort touch his hands now. What did it matter, when in a few hours Voldemort would kill him?

Or maybe it would be days, or months. Who could know?

“ _Look me in the eyes, Harry._ ”

That wasn’t anything Harry hadn’t done before. He looked up, and Voldemort gave him a lipless smile and tightened the hold on his hands before he began, “ _I swear to protect my husband with every bone in my body._ ”

 _He didn’t say from what,_ Harry thought, but his mind was still spinning sometimes, and numb the rest of the time, so when Voldemort prodded him with a little burst of pain in his scar, he said, “ _I swear to protect my husband with every bone in my body._ ”

“ _I swear to hold him safe, and cherish him._ ”

_He didn’t say what way._

“ _I swear to hold him safe, and cherish him.”_

“ _I swear to give him what he needs, privacy, space, and life included._ ”

A muscle twitched above Harry’s eye before he could stop it. What the hell did _that_ mean? But he didn’t want to ask, in case Voldemort took it out on some innocent person at the ceremony. Concern for other people was trailing back to him, like a muscle he’d forgotten to exercise, trembling and unfolding inside him.

“ _I swear to give him what he needs, privacy, space, and life included._ ”

Voldemort paused for a long moment. Harry wondered if he was having trouble thinking of another vow that had enough loopholes, but then, to his enormous surprise, Voldemort asked, “ _And what else do you think we need, Harry_?”

Harry didn’t have to pause as long as Voldemort. “ _I want safety for my friends. For innocents._ ”

“ _That was already settled as part of the treaty. I meant what else you can think of as part of the marriage._ ”

Harry was at a loss. He wished now that he hadn’t been so distant in the last few days, that part of him hadn’t shut down when Hermione had announced the “compromise” that the two sides had come up with and just resigned himself to being a sacrifice. He didn’t know much of what had happened in the last month, in fact. He’d either been shut up at the Dursleys’ house, or at Hogwarts, where McGonagall had placed him after she’d fetched him from his relatives’. He thought that his birthday might have come and passed. In fact, it had to have, right? That was the only way it made sense to have a legal marriage.

Then again, what did Voldemort care about legality?

“ _Harry._ ”

There was that warning tone to his voice again. Harry sighed and looked at Voldemort, wondering what it mattered when his lifespan was now on a timer.

Then again, when had that ever not been true? Born as the seventh month dies…

“ _I suppose I want my own room,_ ” Harry admitted with a shrug. It wasn’t like he could think of anything else, not when he would be going to a prison in reality and a prison of a marriage. “ _And regular meals._ ”

Voldemort stared at him in silence, then nodded and said, “ _I swear to provide you with a room and regular meals._ ”

Harry nodded back, since it seemed to be the safest thing to do. “ _What do you want_?”

Voldemort gave a soft, creepy laugh that raised the hair everywhere on Harry’s body that wasn’t actually his head. “ _I already have what I want._ ”

Harry only nodded and faced the cloaked Ministry representative who had come forwards with a pair of silver rings on a cushion and stuttered out something about the rings reinforcing the magical vows they’d made when they put them on. Harry didn’t know the Ministry man and didn’t care to know. He slid the cold ring onto his own finger, and felt something snap shut around him.

He sighed. _What else can I do?_

And then it occurred to him that, maybe, there was something.

After the summer when he got his Hogwarts letter, he didn’t remember every moment of his time with the Dursleys. Only when something spectacular happened, like the Dementors attacking him and Dudley or Dobby showing up to Levitate that cake. Harry had learned to curl up inside himself and put his mind more or less in a storage box. He could lie on his bed in the smallest bedroom and stare up at the ceiling for hours and not get bored. He could read his textbooks over and over, when he was allowed to have them. He could talk to Hedwig and just listen to the sound of his own voice without marking the time.

Could he do the same thing in his marriage to Voldemort? That was also a prison he didn’t have any way to get out of. And if he came back to life for the sharp moments, the important ones like when Voldemort was going to torture him, it ought to be okay.

He glanced up and caught Ron’s eye where he was standing behind a bulwark of people in Death Eater robes. Ron mouthed to him, “ _There’s a plan_ ,” which Harry could only lip-read because he and Hermione had been saying it so often in the last few days.

Of course there was. His friends would have fought this marriage until the bitter end if there wasn’t. Harry had to have patience, and faith, and trust, and hope the others could carry it out.

He turned back to Voldemort, who was watching him with what looked like mild curiosity, but the triumph thrummed this time behind Harry’s scar. It was a faint, sickening sensation, but better than pain.

“Where will we be staying?” Harry asked in English.

*

“The Malfoys have graciously agreed to give up a wing of their house to us.”

Harry was sure there had been nothing “gracious” about it, but he trapped the thought before it could escape and stuffed it in the back of his mind. “All right,” he said, glancing around the room. It was blank and white, except for a touch of blue here and there along the windowsill and the pillows. At least the bed was large and it looked like there would be room for the robes he owned in the cupboard.

“Harry.”

Harry turned around to face Voldemort, dipping his head a little when their eyes met. “Yes, sir?”

Voldemort paused as if he was going to say something, but then went on. “I expect you to obey the orders that I give you and the Death Eaters give you. Within reason, of course. I would not expect you to go along if they told you to harm yourself.”

“Or if they told me to harm anyone else.”

Harry winced at the tone that burst forth in, but his scar thrummed with more pleasure as Voldemort nodded. “True enough. I suspect few would give you those orders, but you shall not be made to torture.” He leaned nearer, and Harry had to hold his breath and think hard about being at Privet Drive to dim his hatred. “But I do not expect to hear an endless litany of complaints, even about the Death Eaters you may have interacted with—less than pleasantly—in the past. Is that clear, _husband_?”

He had spoken the last word in Parseltongue. Harry met his gaze and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Again, Voldemort paused, as if he was expecting something. An explosion of rage, maybe? Harry had less than no interest in doing something like that, not when he didn’t have any idea what plan of Ron and Hermione’s he would be endangering.

If it depended on a certain time limit or something, though, wouldn’t they have _told_ him?

Voldemort gave a sudden half-bow that startled Harry enough to make him flinch. Voldemort seemed to choose not to notice. “Then I will leave you until this evening.” He paused. “I expect you to obey me.”

Rage did strike Harry then, but it burned out in an instant, as if it didn’t have any kindling in his soul. Maybe that was another thing that being married to Voldemort and staying with the Dursleys had in common, Harry thought. He couldn’t do anything about either, and so he would just get angry sometimes—and even when he was with the Dursleys, he had usually got upset about things like being denied news from the wizarding world, not them—and quiet the rest of the time.

“Okay, sir.”

“You will have dinner with me at six this evening, along with some _honored_ guests from the Ministry. I expect you to wear formal robes and show your very best table manners, and speak to me when I speak to you. Is that clear?”

Harry nodded, but he did ask, “What kind of formal robes? I’ve only worn dress robes to the Yule Ball.”

“I forget how young you are.”

Voldemort sounded disdainful about it, so Harry ducked his head and waited.

“The formal silver robes that you’ll find in the cupboard. Call a house-elf to help you if you don’t know how to put them on.”

“Yes, sir.”

Voldemort turned and left, and Harry sat on the bed, turning to look at the cupboard. The door was half-open, and he could see the glimmer of silver cloth there. He supposed those were the robes.

He sighed and leaned back, staring up at the ceiling, while setting up a reminder in the back of his head to pay more attention as six-o’clock approached. He didn’t have his wand, or any books, or anything else to do. But that was all right. He was good at staying in his room and pretending he didn’t exist.

_Whatever you need to do, Ron and Hermione, hurry up and do it._

*

In the end, Harry didn’t have to worry about calling a house-elf, because one of the Malfoy ones appeared in his room at something that the glittery crystal clock on the wall said was five-thirty. The elf bowed and was silent, not giving him her name. At least she didn’t look as horrible as Dobby had when he was still under the Malfoys’ care, Harry thought, glancing at her. She wore what looked like some kind of skirt made of a pillowcase.

“I need help putting on the formal silver robes, please,” Harry said. His voice was dull in his own ears, but he supposed that was a good thing. The duller, the calmer, the quieter he was, the less there would be for Voldemort to punish him for.

The elf bowed again, and then got the robes out of the cupboard by the simple expedient of snapping her fingers. Harry stood there and let her dress him like a doll. Resentment touched him and vanished again.

This was his life now.

The mirror on the wall showed a pair of robes that looked absolutely starched and uncomfortable on him, but Harry reckoned it didn’t matter. Voldemort had chosen the robes, and maybe if Harry looked ugly in these robes, that was part of the message.

“Thank you,” Harry told the house-elf, who stared at him with huge eyes and then turned and padded out of the room instead of vanishing. Harry supposed he was to follow her, so he did.

Malfoy Manor had more staircases than six houses needed. Harry worked his way down two of them and to the top of a white one that seemed to be made of marble, and where the house-elf pointed the way ahead, down, and to the right, then vanished.

Harry started down the staircase, and something shoved him from behind.

Harry flailed his arms for a second and would have fallen, but the marble staircase’s banisters were something else, some black material that was less slick than marble. He grabbed one and righted himself.

Meanwhile, someone laughed behind him, in a voice he was more than familiar with.

 _Retreat,_ Harry chanted to himself. _To the center of your mind. The fight doesn’t depend on you being defiant right now. Just on you buying time for Ron and Hermione._

Harry turned around and looked emptily up at Malfoy, who was sauntering down the stairs to join him. Malfoy shook his head. He looked gaunt still, like the boy Harry had stalked through most of their sixth year, but he was smiling in a way Harry hadn’t seen since Malfoy had broken his nose on the train at the start of sixth year.

“You couldn’t even catch yourself with magic. You’re not allowed a wand, are you?”

Harry had assumed he wouldn’t be. There was a pulse of loss in the middle of his soul, but, well, there wasn’t much he could do about it. He just shook his head and continued walking down the stairs.

“You’re a pathetic idiot,” Malfoy continued in a voice that sneered more than his face. “You could have run away, but no, instead you had to sacrifice yourself on an altar to save the wizarding world.” He paused. “It _is_ going to be a virgin sacrifice, isn’t it?”

Harry felt himself flush, but he just kept walking. He and Voldemort hadn’t discussed anything about sex. The vows didn’t have it in them. Harry assumed Voldemort would press the matter sooner or later, and, well.

He would do what he had to.

“I knew it!”

Harry sank himself into himself, and the sound of Malfoy’s crowing voice faded. They made their way to the dining room, a place so huge that Harry could barely see the walls, although some of that was probably the enormous glass windows that showed the light of a brilliant summer sunset. The table was huge and white—surprise—and Voldemort sat at the head of it, with the adult Malfoys near the foot, and some wizards and witches in formal robes in between them. No one else Harry recognized.

Harry paused near the doorway, and Voldemort caught his eye.

“ _Here_ ,” he said in Parseltongue, making half the room jump, and tapped the chair beside him.

The chair looked like it was made of silver wood, the back full of twining branches melded together. Harry noted that in a distant, calm part of himself, thought it would be uncomfortable to sit on, and immediately tucked that thought away, too. He walked over and sat down in the chair next to Voldemort.

“ _And how has your afternoon been, dear_?”

More than one person was flinching and cowering, and a few of them were trying to get away with shooting hateful glares at Harry. Probably thinking that Voldemort wouldn’t be speaking Parseltongue if he wasn’t here, Harry thought clinically. That wasn’t certain, though. Nagini was curled up around the feet of Voldemort’s chair, staring at him unblinkingly.

“ _Quiet_ ,” Harry answered in the same language, and let Voldemort heap food on his plate. Most of it seemed to be meat, to his distant surprise. Then again, he didn’t know why he was surprised. He watched from the corner of his eye to see how others handled their forks and knives, and while he didn’t think he was perfect, he gave a good enough accounting of himself that Voldemort ignored him and talked with the others about unfamiliar places needing to be “pacified.”

Harry breathed through it. Ron and Hermione were alive. The other Weasleys were alive. Remus and Tonks were alive. They were going to live, and the treaty protected them. And if Ron and Hermione had a plan, they would be smart enough, because Hermione was there, to keep it under the surface and away from the Death Eaters.

Voldemort’s hand landing on his thigh was unexpected enough that Harry jumped and let his fork clatter to the table. Malfoy laughed obnoxiously from his place next to his parents. Harry ignored it, because Voldemort did.

“ _May I come to your room tonight?”_

And Harry wasn’t ready for this, not at all, if the way his heart picked up was any indication. But it wasn’t about him.

_Not even my wedding is about me. But why should it be different from anything else in my life?_

“ _If that’s what you want,_ ” Harry answered quietly in Parseltongue, looking at Voldemort’s chin since he couldn’t meet his eyes.

“ _But what do you want_?”

Harry paused, trapped. Voldemort wanted obedience. Did that mean that the right thing to do would be to answer yes? Or would he be in trouble if he lied?

Voldemort’s hand squeezed a little, only a little, but Harry didn’t have trouble imagining him squeezing Ron or Hermione’s hearts after they were ripped beating from their chests. He would give the true answer, and see what happened. At least Voldemort would probably take his rage out on Harry instead of his friends.

At least right away.

“ _I want to wait._ ”

Voldemort paused, tilting his head down so that their eyes met whether or not Harry wanted that. Harry braced himself, but there was no explosion of pain behind his scar. He was unsure whether that was a good thing or not. Since when did Voldemort have the self-control necessary to do something like this?

Or swear to a peace treaty, for that reason?

“ _Then we shall wait,_ ” Voldemort said. “ _I want your surrender to be willing._ ”

“ _I wasn’t—I mean, I chose to marry you rather than continue the war._ ”

Voldemort laughed, a sound that silenced the dining room in a way that Malfoy’s hadn’t managed. “ _Do you think me a fool? You walked into the Atrium looking as if you wanted to stab me through the heart._ ”

Harry flinched. He had thought he looked perfectly numb by that point. He sighed out and offered the sincerest apology he could manage at the moment. “ _I’m sorry I looked that way, husband._ ”

Voldemort squeezed Harry’s leg once more and then let go of him. “ _One day, you shall not._ ”

Harry just nodded, and then focused on the pudding in front of him, some chocolate confection covered with whipped cream that he probably would have really enjoyed otherwise. He let the taste wash through him, reminding himself again that he couldn’t afford to react unless something extraordinary happened.

He didn’t have as good a control of his expression as he’d thought. Then again, the Dursleys hadn’t looked at his expression most of the time because he was locked up in his room or the cupboard. Voldemort would probably demand Harry stand behind his throne or kneel next to him or something.

_I don’t want to—_

The tide of resistance rose up inside him, and Harry crushed it. He had to. He _had_ to.

He repeated that mantra over and over to himself, until by the time that dinner ended and Voldemort dismissed him back to his room, Harry felt as if he was floating along on a sea of words. He climbed the stairs like a robot, and had just opened the door to his room when he heard quick footsteps approaching him from behind.

Malfoy slammed his hands onto Harry’s shoulders, slammed him into the wall, and shook him hard enough that Harry heard his glasses break. Harry closed his eyes and tried to let the pain wash through him, too, rise up and wash and not leave a trace behind.

He couldn’t attack the Death Eaters. He had to obey them. He couldn’t complain about them, either. Voldemort had to know about the rivalry he and Malfoy had had in school. Harry breathed out and just made sure that he could breathe in between the times Malfoy slammed him into the door.

Malfoy finally took a step back, his lip curled up, and said, “You had _better not_ think that you’re anything more than a glorified whore. You’re here as a toy. And you can’t replace my father in the Dark Lord’s Inner Circle.”

 _That_ was what he was worried about? Harry straightened, his head whirling. It felt like he had a rising bruise on his cheekbone, and a lump on the back of his head. Again, nothing that he hadn’t gone through before.

He would never replace Lucius Malfoy, that was certain. Malfoy seemed to think that Harry was some kind of master manipulator who would—what? Seduce Voldemort away from his plans for the magical world? Which was laughable, but Harry had the strong feeling that laughing right now was the worst mistake he could make.

_You can’t tell Voldemort. He won’t want to hear you complain._

Harry nodded when Malfoy sneered down at him. “I understand. I won’t do anything that could—”

“See that you don’t, Potter,” Malfoy said in the middle of Harry’s little speech, and strutted out of the room.

_Pompous little git._

But Harry smoothed out the thought. Smooth everything out, he thought as he took off the formal robes and hung them back up in the cupboard. He found pyjamas in a drawer after a bit of searching, although they were made of silk, weirdly. Well, maybe Voldemort didn’t want to feel rough cloth against his skin when they finally had sex.

Harry closed his eyes and waited until the threat of tears went away.

His role, he repeated to himself over and over as he showered in the ridiculously luxurious bathroom and brushed his teeth with the supplies that a house-elf brought him when he called, was to hold strong. Distract Voldemort. Buy time. Ron and Hermione had something important to do.

Maybe even hunting down the Horcruxes?

That thought got tossed from his head with particular violence. Voldemort was a Legilimens, and had that weird connection to Harry’s mind besides. Just because he hadn’t sent visions lately didn’t mean he couldn’t. And Harry couldn’t imagine what would Voldemort do if he found out Harry knew about _that._

He lay in bed and made a long list of things in his head it wouldn’t be good to think about. Freedom. Having a normal life. Dating and marrying who he wanted to. Punching Malfoy in his smug face. Dueling Voldemort. Having his wand back. Attending Hogwarts again. Seeing Hedwig. Reading books. Doing anything other than lying on his bed day in and day out, and going to dinner parties and galas and whatever else Voldemort wanted to show him off at. There had to be things like that.

Then, carefully, Harry lit all the thoughts on fire. He watched them burn in his mind, and scraped the ashes flat where they had been.

Then he lay in the darkness and listened to the clock chime to itself and time go past, in the endless summer that would be the rest of his life unless Ron and Hermione’s plan worked.


	2. Chapter 2

“What the—”

“You did not come down to breakfast.”

“I didn’t know what time it was or anything.” Harry swallowed and stared, but even when he rubbed his eyes, the admittedly blurry image didn’t resolve itself as anything other than Lord Voldemort standing in the door of Harry’s bedroom, carrying a silver breakfast tray in his hands.

“Where are your glasses?”

“They got broken last night.”

Voldemort studied him, or so Harry assumed, from narrow eyes for a long moment before he waved his wand. Harry flinched instinctively, and then again as the repaired glasses slammed into his face.

“I assume that you broke them in a childish tantrum. Do not do so again.”

Harry just nodded. Better for Voldemort to assume that than for Harry to have to lie or say anything about Malfoy. “I won’t, sir.”

He started to get up, but Voldemort made a soft hissing sound that had the Parseltongue word for _still_ somewhere in it, and Harry froze as the man strode up to him and laid the tray across his knees. Harry stared down at the food, at a loss. There were eggs and some kind of steaming omelet and treacle tart and scones and something covered by a silver dish—

His eyes darted sideways to Voldemort, who had arranged himself on a chair he must have conjured and was watching Harry. The trickle of pleasure oozed down behind Harry’s scar again.

“I promised that you would have regular meals. You shall have them.”

“Um, thanks,” Harry said, and picked up the fork and knife and began to cut away at the omelet.

Voldemort corrected him in a constant monotone stream of instructions—“Not that fork, the other one.” “Do not grip so hard.” “Lay the cover on the blankets, it’s not as if the house-elves will not clean them.”—and Harry listened, puzzled but relieved that they wouldn’t discuss anything else right now. He laid aside the cutlery when most of the eggs and scones were still left, and Voldemort stared at him like a hawk who couldn’t believe the mouse under its talons hadn’t stopped squirming yet.

Harry burned the thought at once. It was easier after his effort last night. “Thank you for breakfast.”

“You do have some manners, then.” Voldemort continued to study him. Harry sat there, breathing.

“Why did you not eat all the food?”

“This was as much as I could eat, sir.”

“I want to know why. And why you requested regular meals as part of our marriage vows. Why you assumed I would starve you.”

The impulse to panic clawed through Harry, but it was already an impulse and not the emotion itself, he was grateful to note. He nodded a little. “When I lived with my Muggle relatives, they took food away from me as a punishment. It’s harder for me to endure than some other things.”

The claws unfurled in his gut again. Why was he _giving_ Voldemort information that would help him torture Harry? He should hold out until the very last moments, make Voldemort drag the information out—

But then he would never live to see Ron and Hermione’s plan come to fruition. He couldn’t act like himself. He had to act like the Harry who lived with the Dursleys.

“Why did they do that?”

Harry blinked and looked at Voldemort. He wondered if Voldemort hadn’t been punished like that in the orphanage, or maybe it had just been general starvation and hadn’t been used as a punishment. “They said that I was a burden and taking food out of their mouths. So they repaid the favor.”

Voldemort was silent for long enough that Harry thought he would leave, which would be good. This was weird enough. He needed to lie back in bed and work on his thoughts again, get the worst of them to leave him alone.

Instead, Voldemort reached out and brushed a cold hand down Harry’s arm, as if checking for crumbs that had fallen there. He leaned close enough to leave Harry with an overwhelming impression of red, although admittedly it would have been worse if Voldemort hadn’t repaired his glasses first.

“I will _never_ do that to you.”

The words seemed to echo and linger around the room. Harry’s first thought was that if he really meant it, Voldemort would have spoken them in Parseltongue; then his second thought that he shouldn’t have thought the first one; and his third thought that Voldemort had said it in Parseltongue already, in their wedding vows.

“Er, thanks,” Harry said, after a pause that he _knew_ had lasted too long.

Voldemort nodded and stood up, floating the breakfast tray into the air with a careless wave of his hand. “I expect you to keep regular hours from now on, including joining me for breakfast. It will always be at eight in the Malfoys’ smallest dining room. Get the house-elves to show you the way.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And then I expect you to attend lessons.”

Harry curled his fingers into the blankets over his legs and pinched hard enough that he knew he’d have a little pink spot on his leg later. “Lessons, sir. On what?”

Voldemort turned to stare at him, and Harry dropped his eyes. “On magic, of course.”

“Oh. Um. Will I be allowed my wand?”

It was a stupid question, blurted out too fast, but Voldemort didn’t blink. “Yes, of course. Why did you think you wouldn’t be allowed your wand?”

“I thought you wouldn’t want me to lose my temper and attack someone.”

“I think the peace treaty is far more effective a leash on you than the lack of a wand. Use it. Do not use it against my Death Eaters.” Voldemort reached into his robes and produced the holly wand, which made Harry shiver and struggle not to reach out. “Or against me. But I think you know that.”

There was a strange look in his eyes as he handed Harry his wand. Harry was too caught up in receiving his wand again to pay much attention to it. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“I felt as if I could use your wand while I held it. Why? Is it because you have truly surrendered all of your power to Lord Voldemort?”

Another trap question, like the one about wanting to come to Harry’s room last night. What was the right answer? Was Voldemort testing to see if Harry would tell the truth, or asking for more knowledge?

In the end, Harry chose to do both. “I—haven’t, sir.” Voldemort only nodded, face expressionless, and Harry went on. “I think it’s probably because they’re brother wands. The same reason that they—they can’t cast against each other.”

“Brother wands.”

“Feathers of the same phoenix in them. That’s what—Ollivander said.”

Harry swallowed, remembering that Ollivander had supposedly disappeared. It was one of the few bits of news he’d heard while he was in isolation preparing for his “wedding.” He wondered for a moment what had happened to him, and then pushed the thought away again. If Ollivander was dead, there wasn’t anything Harry could do for him. And if he was still alive, then his safety depended on Harry acting compliant the way everyone else’s did.

“I knew that. I had wanted to see if you would speak the truth.”

Harry nodded, back on slightly more familiar ground. A trap, then. And probably Voldemort would lay out similar traps, and would penalize Harry if he lied. That was fine, as long as Harry knew that. He could maintain his calm, at least enough to make sure that he was the one who suffered for any mistakes he made, and not his friends.

“Cast a spell.”

Harry destroyed the formless wisp of a thought that _was_ trying to form about how peremptory Voldemort could be, and drew his wand. “All right, sir. Which one?”

“The most powerful spell you know.”

There was no question about that, of course. Harry turned carefully away from Voldemort so there would be no chance that the paranoid— _man_ would think Harry was aiming at him, and drifted back into a memory of Hermione’s arms warm and tight around him. The way she had hugged him after fourth year and the disaster in the graveyard. The way she had hugged him after Sirius died.

Harry breathed out and called, “ _Expecto Patronum_!”

The silvery mist seemed lighter than normal as it boiled out of his wand, but considering the edge to the memories and where he was, Harry thought he still did well. The silver stag formed at the end of the bed, tossing its antlers and solidifying as Harry watched. Maybe that was his confidence, his relief that he could still perform the spell.

He glanced at Voldemort to make sure he hadn’t done something wrong, and recoiled. Voldemort’s eyes gleamed at him, possessive, feverish, and the warmth behind his scar burned in a way that nothing had yet.

“Sir?” Harry asked, while Prongs danced over to his side of the bed and pushed at Harry with his antlers as if wanting to be petted. But Harry didn’t dare take his eyes from Voldemort and the—whatever-it-was in his face.

“I cannot cast a Patronus.”

“Oh,” Harry said, because his interest in why Voldemort was telling him this far outweighed his interest in _what_ Voldemort was telling him.

“With you at my side, that deficiency is made up for.” Voldemort raised his hand and let it hover above the scar. Harry braced himself for pain, but there was only more of that warmth as Voldemort’s fingers came to rest on the lightning bolt, which felt as if it might grow hot enough to melt bones and skin. “You know why I took you as husband.”

Harry nodded. “Yeah. I mean, yes, sir.” He did know. To stop the war, to paralyze resistance. There were a lot of people—although not Ron and Hermione—who would give up when the symbol of the fight against Voldemort was in his power.

Voldemort nodded back and retracted his hand. The warmth faded, to Harry’s promptly buried relief. “Then you should know, as well, why I wanted you to practice magic.”

After a moment of thought, Harry did see it. Voldemort probably imagined they _would_ be attacked at some point, either by members of the Order of the Phoenix or by Death Eaters disgusted by what Voldemort had done, like Malfoy.

( _Don’t complain about him. Don’t complain_ ).

“Yes, sir,” Harry said quietly. He would still have to defend himself if that happened, of course. Assuming it wasn’t against Death Eaters. Then Voldemort—might do it? Probably would? He would at least make sure that Harry didn’t die before he wanted him to.

Harry wished the thought was less of a relief. He _did_ have to stay alive for a certain period of time, to let Ron and Hermione’s plan play out, but he might also have to let himself be tortured or die at the right time, to distract Voldemort. He only wished he knew how long that was, and what the plan had been.

He buried it, covered it up. He was concentrating on his breathing, and started when Voldemort moved to the side, leaning at an odd angle, so that their eyes were locked once more.

“There is a tutoring room near the cellars,” Voldemort breathed out. “You are to go there and receive lessons with your tutor. I understand that he has taught you before, so he should know your strengths and weaknesses, and be able to gauge your progress.”

Harry blinked a little. “Who, sir?”

*

“We meet again, Potter.”

Harry just nodded, coiling up all his anger and burning it in the center of his mind. Then he scraped and stomped the ashes flat again. He was getting _good_ at this. He finished burning the anger before he walked across the length of the enormous, silly, parqueted room to stand in front of the man. “Good morning, Professor Snape.”

Snape stared at him, eyes hard and probing. Harry just stared serenely at Snape’s chin. Well, not serenely, not really, but as serenely as he could. He couldn’t let any of his anger or grudges get in the way.

Snape had killed Dumbledore, but that didn’t matter. Other people were still alive, people Harry had to work to save.

Snape was a Death Eater, but that didn’t matter. So was Harry, in a way.

Snape might hurt him, but that didn’t matter. Voldemort had told him not to complain, so Harry wouldn’t.

“What, no complaints?”

“Our lord has made it clear that he won’t tolerate that kind of thing from me,” Harry said, and his voice wasn’t as empty as he wanted, but it was empty enough to make Snape start, apparently. “So I won’t complain, sir.”

“Not if I cast a spell on you that makes you ache?”

 _Nothing he does to me can be worse than what Voldemort is planning or what Voldemort could do._ “No, sir.”

Snape began to stalk in a slow circle around Harry. Harry kept breathing as calmly as he could and stared straight ahead. Having his wand back wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The temptation to turn and strike at Snape was almost overwhelming, in a way it hadn’t been with Malfoy, because now he _could_ do it.

But Snape was one of Voldemort’s most favored Death Eaters. Had to be, after the way he’d killed Dumbledore.

Harry’s chest ached, but he breathed through it, and Snape came to a halt in front of him with his eyes narrowed in a new way.

“You could have done with this kind of obedience when you were a regular Hogwarts student.”

 _Which I never will be again._ One consequence of Voldemort having Harry “tutored” in magic had to be that he wouldn’t be allowed back into a regular Hogwarts classroom. Loss squeezed him and flew past. “Yes, sir.”

Snape took a step backwards, his face shuttering. Maybe it was less fun when Harry refused to play along. “Draw your wand and cast the most powerful spell you know.”

Harry did it, and watched the stag prance around the room for a minute. Snape’s face was fixed in a sneer as he paced in another circle. Harry wondered fleetingly if it was because his father’s Patronus had also been a stag, and then burned that thought, too.

Obedience. Not complaining. Interacting with Snape had to be simpler than it was with Voldemort, who set all those questions as traps and held so much more over Harry’s head.

“That is the most powerful _defensive_ spell you know, I would assume?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The most powerful offensive one.” Snape waved his own wand and conjured a thick metal shield that he hung on the wall. “At this, as strongly as you can and as quickly.”

Harry acted without thinking about what the consequences would be. _Obedience._ “ _Sectumsempra_!”

The shield fractured and clanged into two separate halves that rocked on the floor for a long moment. Snape was in Harry’s face abruptly, clenching both of Harry’s shoulders and shaking them hard enough that Harry’s cheek ached where Malfoy had bruised it last night.

It occurred to Harry to wonder why Voldemort hadn’t said anything about the bruise, but only for a moment. No doubt he’d thought Harry had injured himself in the same “tantrum” that had broken his glasses.

“You will never use that spell again.”

Snape was huffing that command right into his face, but he was no longer the most important thing in Harry’s general vicinity. The thought glanced off the glass walls that Harry had built around his mind, and he nodded.

“Yes, sir.”

“How _could_ you use it after what you did to Mr. Malfoy?” Snape folded his arms and stood back with a violent sneer on his face. “You are a _murderer_. An unrepentant one. You would have murdered him if I had not been there.”

Harry might have felt some sorrow at that, no matter how badly Malfoy had been treating him lately. He didn’t want to kill anyone. As it was, memories of things like that were being steadily buried. He just nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“And for _what_? Why did you cast that spell?”

Harry didn’t know why he said it. He didn’t think some hidden desire to justify himself to Snape still burned in him. After all, it wasn’t like Snape would exonerate him anyway. But he answered the question, just as he had cast the spell. “He was casting the Cruciatus Curse on me at the time.”

Snape’s face shut down again. He stared at Harry, and then said, “Do not lie to me.”

“I’m not, sir.”

“Mr. Malfoy hates to torture people. Not even the Dark Lord has been able to make him feel happy about it.”

Snape sounded like he was talking to convince himself, in Harry’s opinion. But that wasn’t his problem. Harry stood there, blank and passive, waiting for the next thing that could count as a question or a command.

“You will not use that spell again,” Snape said. “And you will not—bring your absurd accusations about Mr. Malfoy before the Dark Lord.”

Harry blinked. Snape had been worried about that? He didn’t know why. Voldemort had made his stance clear. His Death Eaters were more precious possessions to him than Harry. Then again, maybe Voldemort would have taken it out on Malfoy because he had tried to use the Cruciatus Curse on Harry _before_ Voldemort got a chance? Harry didn’t know. It wasn’t like he understood the internal machinations of a bunch of Dark wizards.

“Yes, sir,” he said, to show that he understood Snape.

Snape nodded shortly and seemed to put that idea aside. “Now, you will show me the range of hexes and countercurses that you know.”

*

“Here is a message from your Mudblood friend.”

Harry kept his reaction coiled tightly inside himself, and accepted the letter from Voldemort with a nod of thanks. He wondered, and crushed the wonder before it could fully form, why Voldemort was playing the part of a house-elf, first with the breakfast this morning and now the letter.

But, of course. He would have wanted to read Hermione’s message for himself. At least Harry _was_ allowed owl post, which was also something he had assumed that he wouldn’t get.

He opened the message with eagerness that he couldn’t dim, even though Voldemort sat in the conjured chair again and watched him. Hermione had written only eleven words, with the last two of them underlined heavily.

_Dear Harry,_

_I hope you’re keeping safe and acting like yourself_!

Harry furrowed his brow and turned the letter over, but there was nothing on the other side. Hermione hadn’t even signed her name. Then again, maybe she had on the envelope, since Voldemort had known it was from her. It wasn’t like he would be familiar with her handwriting the way Harry was.

Harry sighed a little, and gave the letter to Voldemort when he reached for it. Voldemort crumpled it up, and Harry strangled his instinctive protest.

“What did she mean by acting like yourself?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Harry said, letting his brow furrow and a little more emotion breathe through him, because this was one of those extraordinary occurrences he had to be awake for. “I thought she would have told me _not_ to act like myself, if anything. She would want me to obey and not do anything reckless or angry so that people can live.”

“And you assume I want the same thing?”

Harry froze as Voldemort leaned across the bed and placed his hands on Harry’s legs. Harry breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, holding steady, but his senses were shrieking at him. There was _weight_ , and _coldness,_ and what if Voldemort wanted—

 _Shit._ He needed to work harder on being indifferent, on lying back and thinking of England if that was what needed to happen.

“Yes, sir,” Harry said after a long moment, when Voldemort’s eyes had begun to glow and he’d remembered that he had a question to answer. “I know that you said you wanted me to obey you and the Death Eaters, and I’m trying. I know I don’t always do it well. I’ll still try.” He thought about adding that he had displeased Professor Snape that afternoon, but then didn’t say it. Voldemort wouldn’t want to hear the complaint.

“You are wrong.”

 _The questions, they_ were _traps._ Harry stiffened, which he knew Voldemort would have caught, but kept his voice as low as he could when he asked, “Then will you please let me know what you want, sir? I’m afraid of getting it wrong.”

Voldemort lifted Harry’s chin, smiling into his face, and replied in Parseltongue. “ _I want your spirit and your fire and your anger and your indignation and your cruelty at my side. I want you obeying me because you want to, and because you are grateful to me for what I give to you. I want to be first on your mind, and not the constant sacrifices that others have constrained you into making._ ”

He brushed his lips across Harry’s, and Harry didn’t let himself pull away, although he did go rigid underneath the touch. Voldemort ran his fingers over Harry’s scar again and pulled back.

“I do not have it yet,” Voldemort continued in English, as if all of this was exquisitely normal. “But I am willing to wait. Am I not immortal?”

Harry looked down, because everything he knew about Horcruxes would be written all over his face if he kept looking up. “I—all right, sir,” he said. “I’ll try.”

“Which means,” Voldemort added, “that I wish you to abandon this façade of emotionless compliance that you are presenting me with.” His hand tightened on Harry’s knee, enough to make Harry gasp.

“But then what do you _want_?” Harry snapped in spite of himself, bringing his eyes up, and noticing that Voldemort’s smile widened. “I don’t—to be obedient and to not complain about people and to obey your Death Eaters, I _have_ to keep silent! I don’t have any other choice!”

“I have told you what I want. It is up to you to find a way of achieving it. A balance.” Voldemort stood up and moved towards the door. “Dinner at six, Harry. This time, wear the green robes. I think you’ll look stunning.”

He turned around and added, with a slight tilt of his head, “And this time, be able to say something other than direct answers to questions. This is your life now. I shall expect you to live it.”

Voldemort walked through the door. Harry crumpled back on the bed, his breathing fast and uneasy, his hands rising to fist in his hair.

How was he supposed to _do_ this if he couldn’t burn his thoughts? If he couldn’t go away in his head?

Had Hermione somehow foreseen that Voldemort would want this? Was that why she’d written her letter? Act like himself…

_I shall expect you to live it._

Do that, and yet somehow obey Voldemort and the Death Eaters and not complain.

This time, Harry deliberately summoned his thoughts, the images of Ron and Hermione and Mrs. Weasley with tears pouring down her face and Headmistress McGonagall and everyone else who might suffer if he acted out, who might need time to search for Horcruxes, who deserved to have uncomplicated lives no matter how complex his was.

_I’ll try._

*

Harry walked into the dining room in the green formal robes that the Malfoy house-elf had helped him put on, his head held high.

He only realized how different that was from his entrance the night before when conversation paused and everyone turned to stare at him. Apparently _they_ had been expecting the meek, cringing mouse. Harry hid a grimace. How did that fit in with Voldemort’s plan that he also obey Death Eaters? Was he supposed to-

“ _Harry, my dear. Come here._ ”

Harry’s attention snapped back to Voldemort—which had probably been the reason Voldemort spoke in Parseltongue in the first place, he thought—and the seat he had once more extended next to him. His eyes shone. Harry could see that much even from this distance, and he wondered if Voldemort had cast charms on his glasses besides the one to fix them.

Harry tipped his head to the side and walked towards Voldemort as if it was his own idea, as if he was going there of his own free will. He sat down and let Voldemort push the chair in for him, which he did by telling Nagini to coil herself around the chair’s feet and shove. Harry sat still and tried to look as if he did this every day.

“ _Very good_ ,” Voldemort told him before reaching for the plates on the table to heap food before Harry as he had last night.

Harry stopped him this time when he would have added meat and only meat. “ _I’m not a pure carnivore, although I appreciate them, my lord,_ ” he said, letting his eyes flick down for a second to Nagini on the floor, swaying a little as she stared at him. “ _Could I have some fruit and potatoes, please_?”

“ _Of course_.” Voldemort all but purred like an immense cat, and Harry told himself to stop making creepy comparisons. “ _You have but to ask._ ”

Harry smiled a little, and dug into the potatoes when Voldemort finished making up the plate. For whatever reason, he hadn’t had potatoes since the Leaving Feast at Hogwarts, after Dumbledore’s death.

The thought of the death made the potatoes taste briefly of ashes, but Harry closed his eyes and fought past that. Dumbledore would want him to live, he knew that. He had gone to great lengths to make sure that neither Snape nor Malfoy knew Harry was there when Snape killed him, and he’d thought Harry would continue the Horcrux quest. He couldn’t have foreseen this, but he wouldn’t want Harry to get hurt because he was grieving, either.

“ _What are you thinking of_?”

Harry looked up at Voldemort. “ _Death_ ,” he said honestly. He didn’t have to say whose death.

Voldemort’s smile surfaced like a shark rising through the waters of his face. “ _No death shall ever touch you._ ”

Harry blinked, utterly thrown. That—that hadn’t been part of the wedding vows or the treaty, had it? Sure, Voldemort had promised to protect him, but he hadn’t said from what.

“ _You look shocked. And yet, you said that you knew the reason I married you, and I told you what I wanted this afternoon._ ”

Harry nodded slowly. He supposed he could see it. Voldemort wouldn’t want to kill Harry if he wanted his willing submission, or some version of it. “ _Sorry, my lord. I wasn’t thinking._ ”

“ _I suspect that fault will become much less pronounced as time goes on._ ”

Harry ducked his head and nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said, in English before he considered it.

Voldemort’s hand slid idly up the back of his neck, and Harry didn’t flinch. Somehow, it was easier than it had been last night not to jump when Voldemort touched him. Harry returned to his potatoes, and Voldemort returned to his conversation with some Ministry flunky, while Harry pondered that.

Maybe detaching _hadn’t_ been the best way to handle this situation. Or maybe not the kind of detachment he’d been doing.

Harry was contemplating that when Malfoy’s nasal voice said from the end of the table, “My lord, I would like to know what kind of _pleasure_ Potter provides you.”

Harry tensed, wildly, but he kept staring at the table, the fork clenched in his fist. Then he reached out for the spoon and dug into the potatoes again.

“I do not know what you mean, young Malfoy.”

Harry caught his breath and ended up inhaling potatoes and choking a little. As he reached for a glass of water, coughing, he felt briefly sorry for Malfoy. He knew that tone in Voldemort’s voice, even if Malfoy didn’t seem to, and he didn’t think he was going to be the one to end up bleeding, himself.

“I mean,” Malfoy said, flinging out a hand that Harry saw from the corner of his eye as he determinedly drank his water, “look at him! Uncouth, ugly, wearing those robes that look as though they cost three Galleons—”

“I chose those robes for him, young Malfoy.”

Darkness loomed about the room, spreading out from Voldemort like a maelstrom. Harry saw the torches visibly lower in their sconces, and his scar burned with a steady fire, but not painful like he had in nightmares. More like sitting too close to a blazing hearth.

Incredibly, none of the other guests flinched, and Malfoy just kept going. Harry blinked. Could none of them sense the extent of Voldemort’s power like he could? Why not? “My apologies, my lord, but he probably told you that he wanted them, right? Trying to show off his eyes. Well, I suppose I can’t blame him, they’re his only good feature, Mudblood mother that he has—”

“And you think our lord would rather be with someone who looks like he tried to Transfigure his face into ice and botched it halfway?” Harry snapped. “You’re insulting _his_ taste?”

This time, the guests did flinch. Those sitting nearest Harry and Voldemort on either side slid their chairs delicately away, as if they assumed Harry would fall to the floor from Voldemort’s Cruciatus. Malfoy gasped, and his face turned pink.

“Potter!” Malfoy spluttered.

“And now you’ve sprayed at least three dishes with your spit.” Harry smiled and kept going, because he would already suffer for what he’d said. He might as well _enjoy_ this memory. “Aren’t you supposed to save that for lubing up your arse when you bend over for Snape?”

Utter, ringing silence consumed the dining room. Harry leaned his elbows on the table—and enjoyed that, too—and stared at Malfoy with a grin that he knew was vicious. In a second, he would begin convulsing with pain. But he would remember that he’d stunned Malfoy speechless, and that his parents sat on either side of him like bewildered statues.

Then a sound broke the stillness.

Voldemort laughed.

It swirled around the dining room, and this time people did shiver and seem to notice the magic that poured away from him. They hunched down. Harry watched Voldemort from the corner of his eye, and didn’t flinch when the cold hand fluttered out and stroked his cheek.

“I will answer the question, young Malfoy, since you have been thoroughly punished for _insulting my taste_ already,” Voldemort said, voice amused but distant as the husk of a burned-out star. “ _That_ is the pleasure my husband provides to me. He makes me laugh, which none of you have ever done.” His eyes swept the table, and everyone tried to flinch and hold still at the same time. “And he has courage undaunted. He pleases me.”

He turned to Harry, who was trying to deal with the dazed feeling that he might have got the combination of defiance and submission that Voldemort wanted right after all, and slid his hand down Harry’s chin to his throat, pausing where the pulse beat. “ _May I come to your room tonight_?” he asked in Parseltongue.

Harry didn’t know what kind of luck had guided him this far, but he decided to ride it a little further. Maybe he could get away with defiance when Malfoy was plainly the one who had started shit. “ _I would prefer to wait, but I will yield if you want me to._ ”

Voldemort’s eyes stared into him, and _these_ stars were on fire, anyway. “ _When you want me there, I will be there._ ”

He sat back, and added, “ _Breakfast at eight-o’clock tomorrow, Harry. I presume that you will not be late._ ”

“ _No, my lord._ ”

It was so easy to say now that he had got one over on Malfoy. Harry glanced at the other boy, his eyes still wide and his face so pink that he looked like a suckling pig, and snickered. His snicker echoed throughout the silent dining room like Voldemort’s laughter had.

Harry reached for the treacle tart in good spirits.

*

“Good night, my own.”

Harry stood utterly still for Voldemort’s kiss, only bowing his head a little when Voldemort stared at him. Then Voldemort walked down the corridor, and Harry turned to walk into his room.

He was smiling, and told himself to stop that. Everything was still horrible. He was still a prisoner, and he ought to be mourning the loss of his freedom and thinking about how he could help Ron and Hermione.

But he had acted like himself, and that was what Hermione had told him to do. So maybe he was doing all right on that front, too.

He folded up his glasses and put them down on the table, and turned—

“ _Sectumsempra_!”

Malfoy was in the doorway with his wand out, and that was all Harry had time to see before he was crumpling in agony, in pain. The Crucio that hit him a few seconds later was actually dim beside that pain, something he hadn’t known could happen.

But then, blood loss was fuzzing the edges of his perceptions and making his head swim.

“I _told_ you not to take my father’s place,” Malfoy snarled, and then Harry heard the door slam.

Harry’s head lolled to the side. He knew he was dying. Part of him was distantly grateful, part was horrified, part was sorry that he probably wasn’t going to live long enough to make a difference to Ron and Hermione’s plan.

And part of him thought, _Sorry, Voldemort, not going to make that breakfast on time, either._

Then the night embraced him.


	3. Chapter 3

“ _Yes, Harry. That is it._ ”

Harry took a long breath, which he had to admit surprised him. He’d come pretty close to never breathing again, he’d thought. He coughed and turned his head, and Voldemort’s hand curved under his chin, supporting him and tilting his face back. Harry opened his mouth to question why, and a smooth, cool liquid filled his throat.

 _Water._ Harry had never been so thirsty, or so grateful. He swallowed, and tried to ignore the way that Voldemort’s hand lingered on his throat, massaging and helping the water down.

Finally, he opened his eyes. He was staring directly into Voldemort’s, of course. He was lying on a bed that didn’t feel like his—and why did he know what his felt like after only two days, anyway?—and a room that seemed to be darkened. He blinked and tried to struggle up, but Voldemort hissed, “ _Lie_ still.”

His voice was so stern that Harry did it, although he didn’t feel burning from his scar. He glanced around, struggling to focus, and then Voldemort slipped his glasses onto his face. Harry could see that, yeah, this wasn’t his room. The bed was a lot bigger, the carpet on the floor seemed to be just deep blue rugs scattered over marble, and the windows were darkened with swathes of deep blue curtains.

“ _My room._ ”

Harry breathed his way through his panic at the thought of being in Voldemort’s bed, and just nodded. Then he sighed. “What happened? How did you find me?”

“ _I felt it through our link when you were hurt,_ ” Voldemort said briefly. “ _When you began to travel down the tunnel to death. You did not die, of course, but it could have been a near thing._ ” His hand drifted for a moment over Harry’s chest, and Harry forced himself to look down.

Bandages swathed his chest from his collarbone to his waist, but they were odd-looking bandages, soft and dark green and _leafy_ , as if they were made of the tendrils of some kind of plant. Well, that wouldn’t be the strangest thing to have happened to Harry since he came into the wizarding world. He reached for them, and Voldemort gripped and held his wrist in a non-painful hold that still rendered him immobile.

“ _You will not do anything that could jeopardize your recovery._ ”

Harry sighed, and lay back. Voldemort continued to sit there and stare at him. Harry couldn’t see from this angle whether he was sitting in a chair next to the bed or on the bed itself, and honestly, he didn’t care.

“What happened to Malfoy?” he asked.

“ _He has spent the last thirty-eight hours under the Cruciatus._ ”

Harry swore in shocked horror and tried to sit up again. Voldemort snapped his teeth close to Harry’s ear, making him jerk back, and then hissed, “ _It is a variation of the spell of my own devising, keeping him from escaping into either unconsciousness or death. It also heals his nerves enough that there will be no permanent damage. Unless I decide that there should be._ ”

Harry glanced around, wondering if Malfoy was in the room with them, but saw no sign. “Please,” he whispered. “Please let him go.”

“ _Why_?”

“He—he doesn’t deserve it.”

“ _He tried to kill you. He tortured you as you were dying. Explain to me why he deserves less than this._ ”

“I don’t want to kill people! I don’t want other people to kill people for me.” Harry stared hard at Voldemort, smoothing away his horror. He could see that he wasn’t convincing his _husband._ He would have to try something else. “And I don’t want to deal with the grudges other Death Eaters might carry against me for him being tortured.”

“ _Other Death Eaters._ ”

“His parents. I know they only have Draco. If they lose him—” Harry’s throat closed, and he shook his head, looking away. He couldn’t pretend to less than the pain he was feeling at this. “I wouldn’t want to deprive parents of their only child. Not when I have no parents.”

“ _I see. And others_?”

Voldemort’s tone was so neutral that Harry had no idea what he was feeling, and there was no burn behind his scar. Harry sighed out raggedly. “And Snape. He tried to protect Draco while he was working on killing Dumbledore. Draco’s death would devastate him, I think.”

Voldemort was so silent that Harry almost thought he’d left. Then he reached out and caressed Harry’s hair. Harry closed his eyes despite himself at how good Voldemort’s cold skin felt against his forehead and temples.

“ _Because you beg for him, he shall be released._ ”

“ _Thank you_ ,” Harry said, in Parseltongue because he thought that might make Voldemort more merciful, and he rolled back over enough so that he could look at Voldemort. “ _Seriously, thank you._ ”

“ _But he shall not be allowed to go on as he was. He was the one who broke your glasses and bruised your cheek, was he not?”_

“ _Um. Yeah._ ”

Harry had only admitted that because he didn’t see how he could get Malfoy in _worse_ trouble, but Voldemort’s eyes darkened with harsh temper. “ _Why did you not tell me_? _We might have avoided this!_ ”

“ _You said that you didn’t want to hear me complain._ ” Harry eyed him, wondering if Voldemort’s orders had also been a trap, like the questions he had asked. “ _It was pretty minor stuff until the Sectumsempra. I thought it would come across as complaining._ ”

Voldemort closed his eyes and spent a long moment sitting there like that. Harry just waited. If he knew Voldemort, and the steady throb behind his scar was a reminder of how deeply he did, he was about to change the rules again.

“ _I meant only that I did not want to listen to you talk about schoolboy rivalries and how Severus had treated you in his classroom_ ,” Voldemort finally said, when the throb had become almost a burn. “ _I did not mean that you were not to speak if one of my Death Eaters harmed you._ ”

Harry nodded. “ _Okay, I’ll keep that in mind for next time._ ”

Voldemort’s eyes were open again so fast that it felt as if there was no transition between Voldemort looking and not looking at him, and now the man leaned towards him in a way that was, frankly, terrifying. “ _There will be no next time. When Malfoy is removed from the Cruciatus, then he will be bound to you with a special Mark that will allow you to override his will at any moment, read his mind, and manipulate his body like a puppet._ ”

“I didn’t ask for that!” Harry snapped, switching back to English.

Voldemort smiled at him, the horrible smile Harry had seen the night of his resurrection in the graveyard, and reached out to push the fall of Harry’s fringe back from his scar. “It does not matter. I need a way to make sure that he will not hurt you again, and that you will not allow him the chance out of a misguided sense of compassion.”

“Why are you so angry, anyway?” Harry asked cautiously. “I mean, you found me in time. Your symbol of conquest didn’t die.”

Voldemort stared at him. Harry stared back. He wanted an answer to his question. Malfoy was a Death Eater, and had been for at least a year, if Harry had his timeline right. Lucius Malfoy was important to Voldemort’s plans, and they were staying in the Malfoys’ _house_. Harry had only been here for two days.

Well. Probably four, now, if he’d been unconscious for thirty-eight hours.

“You really believe,” Voldemort said at last, in a voice that was less dangerous than the magic surging out of his body to make the room darker, “that I would tolerate a Death Eater attacking my Horcrux?”

Harry’s world shattered into pieces.

He began to shake. He was aware of that, but dimly, while he fell more deeply inside himself than he’d ever managed while he was trying to burn and flatten his thoughts.

Voldemort was saying something. Harry couldn’t hear it over the blaze in his mind.

Of course. Of _course._ The connection. The transfer of Voldemort’s powers, like Parseltongue, on the night that Voldemort had tried to kill Harry. The fact that Professor Dumbledore had said that he thought Nagini might be a Horcrux, which meant that living ones weren’t impossible. The fact that Voldemort had wanted to marry him.

Wanted to keep him safe. He had asked if Harry knew why Voldemort had wanted the marriage, and Harry had thought he did.

But it wasn’t—it wasn’t—

Dumbledore had _known._

Harry began to howl. He thought it was laughter, he meant it to be laughter, but it emerged from his throat as a simple keening noise of pain, from so deep inside himself that it felt as if he were tearing out his liver to make it. He rocked in place, his hands wrapped around his head, his chest aching as fiercely as if Malfoy had hit him with the _Sectumsempra_ again. His vision was blurred. He floated in a perfect hell of his own devising.

Voldemort knew. Harry had no idea how, but maybe he had explored the link between them and figured it out. Or maybe it had happened after he’d possessed Harry in the Ministry last year.

When he’d said that death would never touch Harry?

Shit. _Shit._ For Voldemort to die, for the war to really end, _Harry had to die._

“Harry!”

The voice at last got through to him, but Harry was still laugh-howling. He couldn’t stop, even when a sharp slap collided with his cheek. Only when the link between him and Voldemort, the _Horcrux_ link, flared to life, could he pay attention to something other than his own pain and horror and bone-deep, sudden longing to die.

Other emotions came crowding to answer him, impossibly hot and deep and clear, as if Voldemort was holding up a piece of stained grass he had lit on fire in front of Harry.

 _Listen to me,_ Voldemort said down the link, in a mental language that might have been either Parseltongue or English. _You are precious. You shall not die. You are more priceless than gold, than pearls, than my own magic._

Harry stared in silence back down the link, and didn’t answer. Voldemort felt that way, of course he did, because Harry was a way for him to cheat death. But _Harry_ felt differently. He was filthy, tarnished, a—

_Do not refer to yourself that way._

Harry felt his howling finally die with a hiccough. Voldemort’s conviction surrounded and gripped him. He ended up closing his eyes and just drifting there in the middle of those emotions, because he had no idea what else to do.

_Are you not the slightest bit curious how I knew?_

Harry swallowed and managed to reply after a minute of struggling to separate the mental link from the part of him that wanted to speak through his mouth. _I thought it was either the possession in the Ministry or that you explored the link and figured it out._

_It was the possession. I should not have been able to do that no matter what kind of curse scar I left on you. And then I reached down the link once more—exploring it while you were asleep, most of the time—and found…you._

Harry had thought he hated knowing he was a Horcrux, but it was nothing to how much he hated the tone of awe in Voldemort’s voice. He tried to jerk away, but Voldemort’s hands held him still.

_You are precious. You are valued. I will protect you from everything that threatens you, and you shall never die._

Harry reached out and grasped the first thing he could find, the first weapon. _I destroyed another Horcrux of yours. The diary. I enjoyed watching it die._

He felt Voldemort’s fingers flex on either side of his face, and Voldemort uttered a long, cold sigh that faded away like a draught after blowing through a few curtains of Harry’s mind. _I know. Lucius told me some months ago. Why tell me now?_

_I enjoyed doing it. Don’t you want to hurt me?_

Voldemort abruptly withdrew from the mental link. Harry opened his eyes to find the man hovering above him, his hands still encompassing the sides of Harry’s head. Harry tried to turn away, but he was too weak for that. He settled for glaring.

“You are trying to make me hurt you,” Voldemort said. “Kill you. My own, _did I not just tell you that I will not do that?_ ”

Harry closed his eyes and breathed deeply, slowly. This was a nightmare. He had—he had to _do_ something. He had to make Voldemort kill him, no matter what was necessary. It didn’t matter if it messed with Ron and Hermione’s plan. They’d understand eventually, if only because they would know that he’d had to have a good reason for it.

Oh, God.

A deep, sickening realization opened up in him, and he asked before he could think better of it. “Did Dumbledore know that you knew?”

“Yes. I sent him a letter a month or so before he died. Nothing long. Just enough to let him know who it was from, and that I knew what you were.” Voldemort sounded as if he was smiling. “I have to admit, I am somewhat amazed he did not try to get rid of you. Not that it would have worked. There are very few ways to destroy a living Horcrux, as you can see from you surviving what _Malfoy_ cursed you with.”

“Dumbledore—loved me,” Harry said, while his heart rebounded and his thoughts spun in dizzying circles.

What if—

What if Dumbledore had received the letter, and shared it with Ron and Hermione? What if they _knew_ that Harry was a Horcrux, and that there were very few ways to destroy one? What if they had supported the marriage and Hermione had sent that letter that said for him to act like himself because they knew that _Voldemort_ had to kill him, and they thought the best way to do that, since Voldemort already knew and would never do it on purpose, was for Harry to taunt Voldemort into acting on impulse?

Oh, God. It made too much sense.

Harry clapped his hands over his face and tried to roll away again, but Voldemort was right beside him, still holding onto him, and within his mind, too. He buffeted waves of calm and greed against Harry’s own emotions. Harry fought to hang onto his own, but he wasn’t sure that he succeeded. He was breathing more normally than he had before. He was lying still instead of running away from the conclusion that maybe this had been the only plan his friends saw to kill Voldemort and end the war.

But parts of him still burned with shame and self-loathing.

“If you knew what I see when I look at you,” Voldemort murmured, and Harry opened his eyes again, conscious of the tears in them, not sure he cared.

“Someone weak and stupid and broken,” Harry said flatly. He was sure.

“ _No_.” Voldemort lifted his chin. “ _Do you understand how few could have stood against me, survived where you have survived? Do you understand that I would give five Horcruxes to have you here beside me, alive and spitting defiance in my face?”_

Harry shook his head. All he could think of was the shard of Voldemort’s soul clinging to his own, like a—a leech, or something.

“You are beautiful. Not ugly. Why do you think I asked for marriage instead of simply for you to surrender to me?”

“So that you could have the protection of wedding vows?”

Voldemort laughed, a sound that was softer than the one he’d given in the Malfoys’ dining room, but which roared up and rose and rustled around them anyway, still mingled with magic. “I do not need it. No, my Harry, it was so that I could have the privilege of you in my bed.”

“Much good it’s doing you right now,” Harry muttered, filled with the last empty fumes of his temper. What did it _matter_? Voldemort knew he was a Horcrux. He wasn’t going to kill him. Ron and Hermione’s plan wasn’t going to work.

And Dumbledore had _known_. And he hadn’t said anything. And he hadn’t told Harry when Voldemort had revealed that he knew, either.

 _Why?_ What had he hoped would happen?

Harry supposed he would never know.

“You are too wounded for such play,” Voldemort said, his voice a low, rumbling sound now, like an enormous cat Harry had once fantasized about that draped itself over him and purred when no one else in his primary school wanted to spend time with him. “But I would like to do something for you.”

“No,” Harry said miserably. He wanted to be alone and mourn his inability to die.

“You have not even heard what I proposed.”

“I don’t need to.”

Harry opened his eyes and glared, but Voldemort simply held his gaze, and then flooded emotions through the mental link again.

Harry gasped. It wasn’t _physical_ sensation, but the rocking, floating feeling that took him was more wonderful than anything he’d ever felt. It was as if Voldemort’s lust and greed and fascination and pride of possession were lifting him and soaring him right out of his body. His eyes closed, and he basked in it.

Part of him still echoed with hollow laughter. This was the only time he would ever feel something like this, because Voldemort was the only person who would ever think him beautiful with this kind of stain on his soul.

But that just made other parts of himself embrace this more eagerly. And he floated away, and he drifted, and he soared into the center of a sunburst made of light that wrapped around him and dissolved him in pleasure.

He didn’t know if he came, and he didn’t know when he fell asleep. Right now, there was nothing that he could do but go.

*

“We are here because my husband has asked for mercy.”

Harry twitched as the Death Eaters’ eyes focused on him. He had thought Voldemort wouldn’t have a throne room in Malfoy Manor, since it wasn’t actually his house, but, well, he did. And this throne room was an enormous white place that probably served as a ballroom some of the time, with mirrors gleaming on the walls.

Harry didn’t want to see what he looked like, especially since he was wearing, at Voldemort’s direction, green robes with no shirt underneath them, so that the tendrils wrapping his chest showed through. He kept his eyes focused straight ahead, on the elder Malfoys who stood before the gilded throne Voldemort sat on.

Harry’s chair was smaller, but still gilded, and sitting on the dais that Voldemort’s throne occupied instead of on the floor beside it. He didn’t want to think about what that meant, either.

Malfoy—Draco, that was—lay trussed on the floor in front of him. He still twitched, as though the tremors from the Cruciatus Curse coursed through his muscles, although his eyes were sane. Harry didn’t know how Voldemort had done that. He didn’t want to imagine thirty-eight hours of torture.

Or forty-three, as it had more likely been. He didn’t think Voldemort had actually released Malfoy from the curse until Harry woke up for the second time.

“This man attacked my consort,” Voldemort said, with a wave of his hand. Nagini reared next to him and hissed on cue. Everyone in the room except Harry cringed. He wasn’t sure that anything would make him cringe again, after the revelation of his status as a Horcrux. “He cut him open and tortured him with the Cruciatus. He intended to make him die.”

There was utter silence after that, except for Nagini’s soft hisses. She left Voldemort’s throne, and Harry tensed, because he wouldn’t put it past Voldemort to break his word and have his snake devour Malfoy right now. But instead, to Harry’s surprise, Nagini slid over to _him_ and laid her head in his lap.

Harry caressed her, hesitantly, and found that her scales were as warm as if she had been lying in front of a fireplace. He hoped that wasn’t like recognizing like, Horcrux recognizing Horcrux, but he reckoned it probably was.

He tried not to let his self-disgust show on his face.

“But because my consort is merciful and just,” Voldemort said, his voice picking up edges of sibilance, “he has begged me to spare young Malfoy’s life. So I will. But Malfoy will be bound to my consort, the Mark he has disgraced taken from him. He shall receive a replacement Mark, which will tie him in a slavery bond to Harry Potter-Gaunt.”

Harry clenched the hand that wasn’t petting Nagini. He hadn’t even realized that he had a new married name.

“ _You are distressed._ ”

Harry considered not answering Nagini, but from the way she flicked out her tongue, she would just get more impatient and pester him some more. “ _I don’t want this to happen,_ ” he replied in Parseltongue, and people _still_ flinched and jumped and gave muffled screams. Harry didn’t know why. Wouldn’t they get used to it after a while? It was as bad as people on his side flinching continually when someone said Voldemort’s name. “ _I don’t want to own slaves. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want my name to change. I don’t want to be a Horcrux._ ”

“ _Our master has honored us._ ”

“ _Maybe you,_ ” Harry said, because he wasn’t fool enough to argue too much with an enormous snake whose jaws were just a few inches from his groin. “ _But he made me by accident. He doesn’t—he can’t value me._ ”

“ _Harry._ ”

Harry glanced up and met Voldemort’s eyes. Nagini gave a low, wordless hiss of something that might have been contentment. Perhaps she thought Voldemort would be able to convince him, despite the fact that it hadn’t happened so far.

“ _I have told you how much I value you,_ ” Voldemort said clearly, although in Parseltongue, which just made his Death Eaters stare without understanding. “ _I have shown you. I will tell you and show you over and over again, until you understand. You fascinate me as no one else I have ever met does._ ”

“ _Doesn’t Nagini count_?”

Nagini hissed softly again to herself, and looped more of herself up Harry’s legs until she was sprawled most of the way across his lap. Voldemort, meanwhile, laughed, and his magic once again coursed out of his body, and the torches turned green. Harry swallowed. The color reminded him too much of Voldemort’s favorite spell for him to consider it beautiful.

The spell that Voldemort would never use on him, even though Ron and Hermione and Dumbledore had probably all been depending on Harry to arrange it.

“ _She counts. But you are human, you can spend time with me and converse on a level that she does not._ ”

Harry glanced cautiously down at Nagini, wondering how she would react to this pronouncement, but Nagini only said, “ _I am still better at catching rabbits than either of you._ ”

Harry was startled into laughter of his own, and only when Malfoy gave a desperate little whimper did he realize what he probably sounded like to people who couldn’t speak Parseltongue. He swallowed and said, “I still wish that you would reconsider, my lord. Have Malfoy swear an oath not to harm me.”

Malfoy stared at him with wide, blank eyes. Harry looked at him, and found the hatred in those eyes anyway, and winced away from it.

There was hatred in the way that Mrs. Malfoy stepped forwards and gave an elegant bow, too. Harry knew that she loved her son. She probably wished that he’d succeeded in killing Harry and not been found out.

Harry wished for a second that he had, but—would that have killed the Horcrux? Voldemort had said it was very difficult to destroy a living one. Maybe the soul-piece would just have taken over Harry’s body and run him like a puppet. Harry shuddered away from the horror of that thought.

That was the way Voldemort wanted him to run Malfoy.

“My lord,” Mrs. Malfoy murmured, her eyes downcast, “I beg you to reconsider. My son does not deserve such a slavery bond. If you would—”

Voldemort slammed his hand on the arm of the throne. That produced a much louder cracking sound that should have been possible, echoing around the room. Mrs. Malfoy sank fully into a kneeling position, trembling as if someone had replaced her bones with leaves.

“He does not _deserve_ it, you say?” Voldemort hissed. “When he cut open my consort, when he tortured him with the Cruciatus, when he _ignored my explicit orders?_ You forget yourself, Narcissa. Perhaps you would like to join your son under the slavery bond?”

“No,” Harry blurted, and ignored the way that Voldemort’s eyes blazed as they swung to him. “Please. Not her. Not him, either. If you would.” He was suddenly glad that Nagini’s weight was draped over his lap, because it kept him from flinching back as Voldemort’s eyes locked on him. “He can—pay a different price.”

“The only other price I will accept is the death that he tried to deal you.” Voldemort lifted his wand, his eyes still fastened on Harry. “Is that your wish, my own? Shall I cut him open and torture him as he dies?”

Mrs. Malfoy made a sound of inexpressible distress, and then bowed her head. Mr. Malfoy looked like he wanted to go to her and was restraining himself.

And Harry—

Harry was ill with the horror of it all. He didn’t _want_ to decide Malfoy’s fate. He didn’t _want_ to be here.

He didn’t _want_ to be Voldemort’s Horcrux.

But he was, and that meant he had to make a decision. Voldemort actually hadn’t launched the spell yet, which was more restraint than Harry would have expected of him. He was leaving the choice up to Harry.

“I prefer the slavery bond to that,” Harry whispered.

Voldemort nodded, and turned back to face his Death Eaters. “You were all witnesses to the taunts that young Malfoy dealt to my consort and to me in the dining room three days ago. You know what he did to try and kill Harry Potter-Gaunt. What you do _not_ know is that he attacked Harry Potter-Gaunt the first day he was here, the first night, breaking Harry’s glasses and bruising his cheek.”

He leaned to the side, his eyes fixed on someone Harry couldn’t see from the angle of his own chair. “And yet, Harry said nothing. He was protecting young Malfoy even then, so forgiving that he tried to spare him the consequences of his own actions.”

Harry stared at the back of Voldemort’s head. No, that wasn’t it. He hadn’t said anything because Voldemort had told him not to complain, and Harry was still trying to obey Voldemort’s orders at that point.

Then again, bringing that up now, at least in English, would probably get him punished severely.

“Not at all,” Voldemort said softly, “the actions of a _lying, attention-seeking_ _brat_ , are they, Severus?”

Harry sucked in his breath so hard that he started coughing. Nagini leaned her head against his chest. “ _You must be in front of a warm fire soon,_ ” she declared. “ _Your chest is hurt. Master, why are you making my brother Horcrux sit up_?”

“ _It will not be very much longer, Nagini_ ,” Voldemort said absently, his eyes on Snape as he moved forwards and dropped to his knees before Voldemort. Harry let his hands rest on Nagini because he couldn’t do anything else right now.

“My lord.” Snape bowed his head, shooting Harry one intense glance before he lowered his eyes. Harry had no idea what emotion or information that was supposed to convey. “I had many chances to observe Mr. Potter when I was teaching him at school, and although his behavior may have been different since he wed you, I stand by what I said when it came to him as a Potions student. He also almost murdered Mr. Malfoy a few months back. I plead the case that Mr. Malfoy’s _ill-judged, rash_ actions, while inadvisable, were only seeking vengeance for Mr. Potter’s unfair treatment of him.”

“Harry,” Voldemort said, although he never turned away from staring at Snape. “How well did you do in Potions at Hogwarts?”

Harry blinked, utterly thrown, but answered because it delayed the moment when the slavery bond became final. “I didn’t do well.”

“What mark did you earn in Potions on your OWL?”

 _This is so bizarre,_ Harry thought helplessly. But he replied. “An Exceeds Expectations.”

“Why did you use _Sectumsempra_ on young Mr. Malfoy?”

“He was trying to cast the Cruciatus on me,” Harry said quietly, staring down at Malfoy, who was lying on the floor now with his chin tucked into his chest, not meeting anyone’s eyes. “And I had seen the spell in a book that said it was for enemies. I didn’t know what it would do at the time.”

“I see,” said Voldemort, with some awful weight of emphasis in the last word that Harry didn’t want to think about, and turned to stare at Snape. “So. He does well on his exams despite your attempts to stamp the talent out of him. And he defends himself from a torture curse with a spell that he did not know the nature of—the same spell that Mr. Malfoy used on my consort, which he _did_ know. I wonder how far I should trust your information, Severus.”

“My lord,” Snape said calmly, although Harry saw a muscle twitching in his cheek and thought that he was probably a lot less calm than he wanted to look. “I gave you the information as I had at it at the time.”

“And it nearly resulted in the death of my consort, since I would have known about Mr. Malfoy’s potential for violence towards him much earlier if Harry had been inspired to tell me the truth.” Voldemort lashed out with a boot and kicked Snape in the side of the head, knocking him over. “Get out of my sight. I shall think of a punishment for you later.”

The silence of the room returned as Snape picked himself up and edged backwards, bowing, until he reached the far edge of the room and stood. Harry wondered if the man would come at him now. Probably not. Voldemort would end the lessons Harry was having with Snape, most likely, and Snape wouldn’t want to be placed under a slavery bond the way Malfoy was going to be.

It seemed that wouldn’t be delayed any longer. Voldemort floated Malfoy, still bound, over to Harry, and Harry reluctantly stood up when Voldemort hissed at him to do so, pushing Nagini onto the floor. The bonds around Malfoy dissolved, and Voldemort instructed Malfoy to kneel and Harry to put his hands in the middle of the other boy’s forehead.

_Boy. He’s a kid, like me._

But they were both legal wizarding adults, and there was no getting out of this. Voldemort was the one to actually cast the spell, thank God, but Harry had to repeat certain words in Parseltongue and Latin when Voldemort told him to.

Once again, Harry tried to detach himself from everything that was happening around him. He stared straight ahead instead of down at Malfoy as he said them, and hoped he hid his flinches when the Dark Mark was stripped from Malfoy and he screamed, and when the new Mark formed on Malfoy’s right arm in its place, and he screamed.

Harry did sneak a look down at the new Mark as it formed, too fascinated not to. A green snake carrying a lightning bolt in its mouth.

Pretentious, but then, look who was casting it.

Harry swallowed back his desire to say that aloud, and then gasped aloud instead as Voldemort hissed a final incantation and the slavery bond formed between him and Malfoy. Suddenly there were three strings floating in the back of Harry’s mind, separate from his connection with Voldemort. One of them, Harry knew without asking, led to Malfoy’s mind, and would let him read the git’s thoughts. One led to Malfoy’s will, and would let him override it.

And one would let Harry manipulate his body like a marionette.

Harry lifted his hands off Malfoy’s forehead as soon as he could. Malfoy bowed and stumbled to his feet, moving back into the arms of his mother, who received him.

“Your will be done, my lords,” he gasped, the first words he’d spoken all evening.

Harry just nodded, because he had no idea what else was expected of him, even when Voldemort looked in his direction. Luckily, that seemed to be all Voldemort required. He made a languid motion with one hand, and the Death Eaters bowed and began filing out of the throne room.

Harry sat back down on his chair, and Nagini crawled promptly back into his lap, hissing complaints about being displaced. He shuddered and shuddered and shuddered.

“You do not want to be my Horcrux,” Voldemort said curiously. “You do not want to be a lord. You do not want to be the Boy-Who-Lived. What do you want to be?”

Harry didn’t know what to say. His first desire was to say that he wanted to be the Boy-Who-Lived and go back to his friends, but, well, he had thought about dying a lot today, hadn’t he? And Ron and Hermione…

If they really had known he was a Horcrux and had been encouraging him to get himself killed, he didn’t know how to speak to them.

Finally, he whispered, “Free. Free would be good.”

Voldemort rose and walked towards him. Harry knew that, but he didn’t look. He sat still as Voldemort’s cool hand slid down his forehead and rested for a moment on the back of his neck.

“ _My brother Horcrux is cold and still wounded, master,_ ” Nagini said imperiously. “ _Take him to your bed and warm him._ ”

Harry swallowed, his eyes flying open, but Voldemort only said, “ _He will come, but he will rest._ ”

Harry had to put up with being floated back to Voldemort’s bed like a toddler in an invisible pram. But he didn’t argue. He lay down under the covers and let Voldemort sling a cold arm over his waist and hold him there on his back, so that he couldn’t roll over and irritate the dressings on his chest.

_Nagini is mad if she thinks he can warm me._

This time, when the night came for him, he welcomed it eagerly.


	4. Chapter 4

After that, the days…drifted.

Harry learned to ignore the sensation of Malfoy’s slavery bond hovering in the back of his mind, if not the hate-filled glares that Malfoy gave him and the way he scurried out of a room when Harry entered it. He didn’t have to _do_ anything with the bond. Just having it there was a pretty effective deterrent for Malfoy, and for his parents, who also went out of their way to avoid Harry.

He went into the gardens a lot, watching as autumn came in and faded the leaves on the Malfoys’ trees. There were magically-warmed plots of flowers that would probably stay the same all through the winter, for all that Harry knew. The flowers were bright brassy red and gold, but Harry found that he preferred the softer colors the gardens got as leaves drifted to the ground, and he walked through them with them crunching softly under his feet. The house-elves would clean them up in the mornings, but there were enough huge trees and enough stretches of garden that Harry could nearly always find some to walk through in the afternoons.

Nagini sometimes accompanied him, although she whined constantly in Parseltongue about how cold it was and how much she wanted to hibernate. One day when they were near a huge crystalline pond in the back of the Malfoys’ grounds, Harry asked her, “ _Why don’t you hibernate if that’s what you want to do_?”

Nagini lifted her head. “ _My master needs me._ ”

Harry sighed a little and sat down on a marble (of course) bench next to the pond. Nagini promptly crawled into his lap, the way she always did for the warmth when he held still long enough. Harry stroked her belly and murmured, “ _Must be nice to have a purpose._ ”

“ _You have one, too._ ”

“ _I can’t figure out how to do it,_ ” Harry replied, thinking of the plan that Ron and Hermione had wanted him to carry out. Or not carry out? The more he thought about it, the more he doubted the conclusion that he’d come to. He’d been too…upset when he’d first learned he was a Horcrux to think rationally about what his friends wanted or knew.

But they were still his friends. Harry knew that with an unshakeable faith that Voldemort and Dumbledore together couldn’t destroy. So they wanted him to do something else. But _what_?

“ _You are doing fine, little brother. You make the master happy._ ”

Harry blinked and returned to himself, and then felt dumb for feeling surprised. Of course Nagini wouldn’t think of the same purpose Harry was thinking of. “ _I don’t see how I can. He just talks to me a few times a day and asks to come to my bed, and I refuse._ ”

“ _But he is much calmer with you here._ ” Nagini flickered her tongue out so that it brushed in a tickling way across Harry’s wristbone, and he jumped. “ _He does not torture people simply for failing him._ ”

“ _He tortured Malfoy._ ”

“ _That one hurt you._ ”

Harry couldn’t come up with a reply to that, so he shrugged and continued to watch the pond, the little transparent ripples curling in to the foot of the bench. His fingers brushed over something carved on the arm next to him, and he turned his head to see runes.

Nagini turned her head with him. “ _They could keep us warmer. Why do you not use them?_ ”

Harry had his wand, but he shook his head. “ _I’ve never studied them. I don’t know how to use them._ ”

Nagini gave a little hiss that sounded surprised. “ _I thought all humans knew. I shall speak to the master about this._ ”

Harry tensed, thinking of how Voldemort might punish him for not being smart enough, and then let it go with a sigh. Honestly, he didn’t think that would happen. Voldemort wanted him to be secure, and that didn’t include torturing him.

*

“Uh…what is this?”

“Books.”

Voldemort had indeed unloaded a bunch of books on the small desk that had been added to Harry’s room on his second week there, but Harry didn’t understand why Voldemort had brought them himself, or why he was now staring expectantly at Harry. Harry picked up one of the books and turned it over.

_Runes for the Beginner._

Harry licked his lips. “Nagini told you that I didn’t know how to use them.”

“Yes. Why did you not take Ancient Runes at Hogwarts?”

Harry darted a glance at Voldemort, but he only stared back expectantly, and Harry was the one who ended up looking away. “I chose my optional classes based on which ones looked easiest and which ones Ron was taking,” he muttered, digging through the books and revealing they were mostly on Runes, although one was on Defense. “So I picked Divination and Care of Magical Creatures.”

Voldemort made a soft noise, which Harry didn’t recognize as laughter until he looked back at him. “And here I thought you had chosen Divination because you were looking to harness the magic of prophecies against me.”

Harry blinked. “I didn’t know about the prophecy until a little more than a year ago. End of my fifth year.”

Voldemort leaned towards him, smooth snake-like face alight with…something. “Why did Dumbledore not tell you about it earlier?”

“He said that he wanted me to have a happy childhood.”

“He failed you, then.” Voldemort stared at Harry with the kind of intensity that always made Harry feel as if he was having a layer of skin peeled off. Harry didn’t know why he did that. Yes, he was a Horcrux, but Voldemort already knew that. It didn’t make him _interesting._ “You were abused.”

Harry could hardly object to Voldemort putting it like that, not when he’d told the man himself. “Yes,” he said simply, and reached for the nearest Runes book. “Is there someone besides Snape here who can teach me?”

“I will never allow him near you again.” Voldemort reached out and closed his fingers in that immovable grip around Harry’s wrist. “I think that you are trapped.”

“Well, _yeah_.”

Voldemort’s fingers tightened for a single moment, but he shook his head. “Not here in this house. I mean that you are trapped in the constant expectation of having to do something, rescue someone, save yourself. It makes sense for the kind of childhood you had, where you had to be vigilant for what insult was coming next. And then your Hogwarts years, which I imagine look different when one is not listening to a Snape or Malfoy recite the tale.”

Harry frowned at him. “You’re saying that I don’t know what to do with myself because I’m trapped in a fight-or-flight response?”

“That is, I think, the Muggle term.” Voldemort’s fingers pressed down hard one more time, caressed, and then released him. “Your magic is always poised around you, do you know that? Nagini reports that with all the time in the world, you can rarely settle to a book or a task. You are not used to having so much quiet time. Time when you are _expected_ to study, to rest, to improve yourself.”

Harry stared at him, feeling the way he had when Voldemort was asking about his OWL scores. “Why do you _care,_ though? I mean, why does it matter to you if I study and read and—improve myself?” He couldn’t keep the contempt from his tone on those last words, but Voldemort only watched him with unwinking red eyes, not even sending a hint of a burn through Harry’s scar. “Resting, yeah, I can understand that. You want my body to be healthy to keep holding the Horcrux. But the rest?”

“You are my consort.”

“That’s a convenient excuse to keep your Horcrux nearby.”

“No. It is not.” Voldemort leaned near, overwhelmingly, the way he had when Harry woke in bed after Malfoy’s attack. “It is _true._ I have already told you that I want your tamed defiance. That remains true. Do not drift through your days, Harry Potter-Gaunt. _Live_.”

“I don’t know _how_!”

The words broke out of Harry’s throat, and he blinked. Voldemort eased back a little, a faint smile curling around the edges of his mouth like Nagini around a chair. “And you, being the Boy-Who-Lived,” he said, soft, mocking. “Well. We will begin with Runes.”

“Wait a minute. _You’re_ teaching me?”

“Why would I not?”

“You’re busy running an empire. Plotting the ruin of all that’s good and true in the world. Killing Muggleborns.”

Voldemort’s eyes flared for a second, and Harry looked away. But Voldemort’s voice had acquired only a mild hardness when he said, “The war does not take up as much of my time now that we have the treaty. I can make longer-term plans.”

“You haven’t given up on them.”

“Of course I have not. But _you_ are one of the most important pieces of my plans, Harry. I need you happy and safe and healthy.”

Harry eyed him. “Why?”

Voldemort sat there as if weighing how much he should tell him. Harry nodded to himself. He hadn’t really expected an answer.

And then, shocking the hell out of him, Voldemort gave him one. “Surely you have noticed that I have not had the kind of _outbursts_ that I used to.” He switched to Parseltongue, as if he thought someone might be listening in. “ _Your presence has begun to balance me, as my explorations down the Horcrux link to figure out what you were did during the last year. I am able to plan and think with a clarity that has not been mine in decades. On the other hand, that clarity diminishes when I feel your unhappiness. So. It becomes my place to ensure that happiness_.”

Harry stared with his mouth open. He thought Voldemort would tell him to stop doing that, that it was undignified, but Voldemort simply stared at him, and a tickle of something that might have been amusement ran behind Harry’s scar.

“ _What is it, Harry? Have so few people ever said that they wish to see you happy_?”

“ _I—I can only remember one or two._ ”

Voldemort’s face changed, to one of those smooth blank expressions that Harry had trouble reading, and the trickle of amusement disappeared. He leaned forwards. “ _Now there are three._ ”

Harry glanced away from him and picked up one of the Runes books with shaking fingers. Then he had to put it down again and take a deep breath. “ _I’m not a good student. You’re going to get frustrated with me._ ”

“ _That does not matter. This increases your happiness, and I have told you why I am invested in that._ ”

Absurdly, that calmed Harry down. Voldemort hadn’t changed overnight into a good person. He had simply become someone who needed to act a certain way to secure his own immortality and satisfaction. It was just that this time, that involved making someone else happy instead of killing and torturing people.

“ _Now, the first book will give you a good overview of Runes, which you will need, as you’ve never studied them before. Open it to page five…_ ”

And Harry let himself sink into the absurdity of the situation that was being tutored in Runes by the Dark Lord, and opened the book.

*

“Potter! Potter, wait.”

 _Shit._ Harry had been wandering the corridors of Malfoy Manor, for once by himself, without Nagini or Voldemort or any of the Death Eaters who spoke to him in anxious ways as they attempted to curry favor with the Dark Lord’s husband. And now Snape had found him.

Harry turned around, his hand resting lightly on his wand, although he didn’t think that he could beat Snape if it came down to a duel. Which meant that he didn’t want it to come down to that.

“What is it, Snape?” Harry lifted his chin high and adjusted his stance, the way Voldemort had also been tutoring him on, and Snape sneered at him as he came to a stop. But he also glanced cautiously around, in a way that said he knew as well as Harry that Harry being alone wasn’t going to last much longer.

“I know what you are.”

Harry blinked, but in a way, he wasn’t surprised that Snape knew he was a Horcrux. Both Dumbledore and Voldemort might have trusted him with that information. “Okay. So what?”

“You _must_ not live.”

Wow. So Snape was Dumbledore’s man after all. This wasn’t the way Harry had expected it to be confirmed. He wormed his fingers into the cloth of his robes and stared blankly at Snape. “I think our lord would disagree with you about that.”

Snape curled his lip back from his teeth. “So you quickly become the subservient whore that I thought you would.” He drew his wand, which was gleaming ebony. “Albus was wrong to put so much faith in you, and so were your friends.”

Harry swallowed. “My _friends_ expected me to get killed mouthing off to Voldemort. Forgive me if I think that their opinions don’t count for much.” He was watching Snape’s wand hand, not his face, but the contempt in his voice was enough to tell Harry what expression he would have been wearing, anyway.

“You stupid boy,” Snape whispered. “Albus thought there was some way that you would survive, as long as you taunted the Dark Lord into casting the Killing Curse at you _himself._ That it would kill the soul-shard in you and not the soul that makes you Harry Potter. That was what they hoped to accomplish, Weasley and Granger, after they had destroyed the other Horcruxes. They held faith in Albus’s ridiculous interpretations of the research he found on living Horcruxes. I do not have that faith, not when the snake still lives.”

Harry flung himself to the side as the first blast of golden light came at him, but the golden light clung to the floor, and the walls, and began to grow and crackle. It was fire of some kind, Harry saw, even as he backed away and began to pant from the heat. Fire that formed into the shapes of beasts with horns and fangs and claws and uplifted wings, stalking towards him, snapping their teeth.

“Fiendfyre,” Snape said, from somewhere behind the wall. His voice was strained, as if he had to avoid the fire himself. “It will kill any Horcrux.”

Harry closed his eyes and reached out through his mental link to Voldemort. Maybe it was stupid, maybe it was only based on the past few weeks of studying Runes and talking with Voldemort and spending time in the gardens with Nagini, but _he wanted to live._

_Voldemort!_

Then he turned and ran.

He avoided all the doors of the rooms that stood open; he didn’t know whether any of them led outside, and he didn’t want to be trapped. He sped as if a hundred Dudleys and a thousand gangs were chasing him, panting, the air rushing in and out of his lungs rapidly becoming superheated. He leaped down a staircase and galloped around a corner that he hoped would lead further up into the house.

It led into a dead-end corridor with just a few doors on either side. Harry flung them open and found only blank-walled places that once might have been used as Potions labs, considering the odd-colored splashes on the floor.

The fire roared behind him.

Harry turned around, shaking. He found himself thinking of Voldemort’s promise that death would never touch him, and feeling an odd, disorienting jolt of sadness that that promise had proved as false as all the others that everyone had ever made him.

This Fiendfyre could kill a Horcrux, he was sure, in the way that the combination of _Sectumsempra_ and a Cruciatus couldn’t. He was going to die.

Harry swallowed and tried to stand as tall as he could. The flames boiled towards him, the nearest one forming into the shape of a basilisk. He wondered what it would feel like to burn. If it would be quick or not.

Then the flames abruptly surged away from him. Harry stared open-mouthed as a circle of empty floor and cool air opened between him and them, and then the beasts were crowding back down the corridor, being forced away by what looked like an invisible expanding barrier.

Into the space, Voldemort Apparated.

He was glowing along the edges with a red-black haze Harry had never seen before, but supposed must be the result of handling high-level Dark magic. He lifted his arms, and his black robes fell away from them, revealing gleaming pale skin. Voldemort extended his hands and waved his yew wand once, twice, in quick slashes.

The fire wailed and began to _shrink_ , compressed by that same invisible barrier into a smaller and smaller space, except that it was closing in from all sides now, instead of only in the front. Harry didn’t want to move, not right now, but he felt the heat draining away, saw the beasts losing their forms and becoming only mindless fire again. Then they shrank into a pinprick of golden-yellow light.

Harry expected that pinprick to vanish, but instead, Voldemort stalked forwards and picked it up. He tilted it in his hand for a second as if it actually weighed _something_ —and maybe it did—and then looked up and along the length of the corridor at Snape. Snape stood there with his wand dangling at his side, his face deathly pale.

“Severus.” Voldemort shook his head. “You have signed your death warrant.”

Snape shifted his feet and seemed to balance his weight as if he was getting ready to charge. Harry found himself moving forwards to stand beside Voldemort, and then stopped. He didn’t want to protect _Voldemort,_ did he?

This was still the man who had killed his parents and tortured him in the graveyard and imprisoned him in this farce of a marriage.

This was the man who had answered his questions and saved his life.

Voldemort flicked a brief glance at Harry, then faced Snape, who was saying, “I have never been more than half-alive since the day you killed her.”

“Who?” Harry couldn’t help blurting. It absolutely wasn’t the thing he should have been worrying about, but it had taken him so far aback that he didn’t think he could see the ground from here. Snape had been in _love_ with someone at some point? Someone Voldemort had killed? Was that why he’d changed his mind and started serving Dumbledore?

“Your mother,” Voldemort said, his attention briefly straying to Harry again. “He begged me to spare her life. I would have if she had given you up.”

Harry couldn’t help but swallow. _Stand aside, you silly girl. Stand aside now!_

But she hadn’t, and she had died, and Snape had turned, and Harry had lived.

Harry stared at Snape and said, “How would my mum feel about you trying to kill me?”

“How would she feel about her son sleeping with her murderer?”

“We are not here to trade insults,” Voldemort said. “I would have given you a quick death for the years of service you had shown me, Severus, but that is not to be.” He tilted his head and breathed on the concentrated fireball hovering in his hand.

The Fiendfyre loomed up and surged down the corridor, rapidly expanding as it did, and grabbed Snape. Harry saw him struggling for a long moment, screaming, in the midst of flames that had once again transformed into chimeras and manticores and basilisks and dragons, and didn’t seem to want to let Snape go. His silhouette finally collapsed inwards, but he went on screaming for a long time.

“I notice that you did not beg me to spare his life.”

Harry started and lifted his head to stare at Voldemort. Voldemort stared back. Harry swallowed and said, “He—he confirmed that it was Dumbledore’s plan and my friends’ plan to have me defy you and taunt you into killing me, because they thought the soul-shard would die because of the Killing Curse and I would survive. I think they wanted me to kill Nagini, too, because Snape said that she was still alive, and he sounded disgusted by that.”

“How?” Voldemort sounded fascinated. “You have nothing capable of killing a Horcrux here.”

Harry shook his head, and abruptly, he felt his eyes burn with tears. What Ron and Hermione had wanted wasn’t as awful as he had been envisioning, because they had still hoped he would survive, but they had known he was a Horcrux, and Dumbledore had known he was a Horcrux, and _Snape_ had known he was a Horcrux, and all of them had been counting on him to do some impossible heroic feat again, the way he had with the basilisk and Quirrell and surviving the graveyard, and—

Voldemort’s arms came around him, clasping him. He lifted Harry and spun once, and they were in someone’s room. Harry wasn’t surprised, when he lifted his head from the stupid tears consuming him, to see that it was Voldemort’s.

And it was stupid, _everything_ was stupid, but his world was breaking apart, and he wanted to forget. He wanted to feel _something different._

He looked Voldemort straight in the eyes, and said, “Yes.”

*

Voldemort insisted on using a whole lot of spells to prepare him, which made Harry feel weird and empty and clean and slick. But he didn’t mind it because Voldemort was purring through the link into his mind, sending him feelings and sensations and images of pleasure, and it was much easier to concentrate on those.

Even when Voldemort insisted that Harry lift his legs practically _over his shoulders_ and entered him, it was easy to concentrate on his eyes, brighter than the fire that had eaten Snape, and the way that their link shivered and solidified in a sudden snap, so it was more like they were one being in two bodies than two standing on either side of a connection.

 _Did you know that this would happen?_ the Harry-part of them thought.

_I have hardly had sex with Nagini or my other Horcruxes._

Part of them laughed. Part of them delighted in that laughter and clutched it to them and wove it around them, and the madness that had threatened to consume them briefly when they thought that part of them was in danger of dying faded further away.

Through the tumbling storm that consumed them then, they saw and felt and understood and forgave everything. Why they had wanted to kill Malfoy and spare him. Why they had come for a toddler on the basis of a half-heard prophecy and what it had been like to grow up without parents. Why they despised and loved the Muggle world. Why they had fought so strongly to survive everything.

An orphanage in the middle of falling bombs. Growing up in a cupboard. Being considered a Mudblood in Slytherin House. Having one of them try to kill the other one of them again and again. Being rendered a bodiless wraith for thirteen years. The hatred and suspicion of the entire wizarding world. The Imperius Curse, the Cruciatus Curse, becoming a Horcrux, _making_ Horcruxes.

The storm blew further and further through them, and then grasped and raged and subsided, leaving them drifting together in perfect understanding, which was not the same as perfect unity. But they did understand.

And every thrust was mutual, too, and every gasp, and when they came, it was another storm of their own, Fiendfyre that blasted through them and gave them pleasure and triumph they had not known existed.

*

Harry woke up, slowly, the next morning, separate again. He knew it was Voldemort’s cold arm wrapped around his waist, and he knew it was his own arse that was sore, not _theirs._

But with the Horcrux link open and thrumming between them, Harry also knew that it was unlikely they would ever be completely separate again.

He lay there and thought about that, about the fact that he’d let his parents’ murderer fuck him. But he didn’t retreat from the thoughts, this time. He lay there and looked at them, and let them look back.

He’d done that. Just like he’d walked into the wedding and decided that he would try to achieve some combination of obedience to Voldemort and living his own life.

Feeling what some people would think was the appropriate amount of self-hatred for the rest of that life wasn’t something Harry was interested in doing.

So. He kept Voldemort sane. He could temper his actions, too, surely, as long as he did it carefully and without moving too fast. He—

He _understood,_ from the inside out, what it was like to be Voldemort, what had driven him to try to be immortal. He’d felt that fear himself, held those memories now. He couldn’t just reject that and go back to the person he had been yesterday, a week ago, two months ago.

And one thing Harry understood was that Voldemort had felt the amount of rage over being rejected and vilified by the wizarding world that Harry _should_ have felt for his own circumstances, and never had.

They’d labeled him the Heir of Slytherin, they’d looked aside while he was tortured with a blood quill, they’d called him a delusional liar and a cheater and they’d made him compete in a Tournament against bloody _dragons_ , and they still had the—the _gall_ to expect him to save them?

_Well, I already did._

They had the treaty. They had their peace. Ron and Hermione might destroy the other Horcruxes and still not bring down Voldemort’s wrath on them, since he had said he would give up all the others for the sake of being with Harry. Harry hoped he could see his friends again, and have the chance to explain his choices to them.

And hear their explanation.

For the first time, he no longer thought it should only flow one way.

“ _I have never seen him truly asleep before._ ”

Harry glanced around, not starting even though he hadn’t consciously been aware of Nagini’s presence in the bedroom before. She was his sister, and she was part of himself, and Harry knew he would never be in danger around her.

Nagini slid over and raised her head to glance across the sheets. Harry didn’t turn. “ _What do you mean? I thought he slept._ ”

Nagini turned her head slightly to look at him. “ _Once, when he was pure human, but not since he made the second of our siblings, from what he has told me. He would lie still and let his mind roam among thoughts, but he never went below the surface. I do not believe that he has dreamed in decades. But his eyes move as if he is dreaming now._ ”

Harry did have to roll over then, and Nagini was right. Voldemort’s eyes flickered rapidly back and forth under his eyelids.

Also, he didn’t move even when Harry touched his marble-like cheek. He never would have done that before. He trusted Harry and Nagini deeply enough to lie like this and not register their movement around him as a threat.

_I gave Voldemort back his dreams._

A strange wonder encompassed Harry then, perhaps with some flicker of a thing like pride. He lay back down beside Voldemort, his hand resting on the arm that hadn’t stopped embracing him, and breathed slowly out.

He had stopped the war. Not the way he’d always thought he would, but—it was stopped, wasn’t it? And Voldemort was sane. And he was invested in Harry’s happiness.

And Harry could _live._ He didn’t have to die a martyr, or even someone who might have a slim chance of returning. He didn’t have to give up the Horcrux connection that throbbed now in his head like the edge of sunlight on dancing leaves.

Then he remembered Voldemort burning Snape to death yesterday, and sighed.

This wasn’t a life of pure sunlight. This was going to take so much _work._

But for the first time, Harry could think of himself as Harry Potter-Gaunt, the husband of Lord Voldemort, and not mind.

He thought, soon, it would be deeper than not minding.

Voldemort stirred next to him, and paused, still and careful. Harry was the one who turned to face him, and smiled.

“Good morning,” he said.

 **The End**.


End file.
